We were at the Immigration Office in Abu Dhabi today to handle an administrative chore pertaining to passports. Eventually, pretty much everyone here spends hours at the Immigration Office.

The office is in several buildings on 19th Street, near the church district. It may be one of the busiest government offices in the city, behind only the Abu Dhabi Health Services building, where medical tests are given and blood is taken for screenings.

But before we could get any business done inside the building, we needed to stop at one of the “official” typing centers to obtain the correct form and have it done in clear Arabic from a bilingual typist.

Six small shops are lined up outside the Immigration building, and they provide identical services. I dismissed the tout for store No. 3 (“too crowded”) but followed the directions for tout No. 4, who directed me to the back of the busy shop, where a large, jolly looking African woman, wearing a colorful headscarf, was stationed. The tout made clear that she was adept in English, and she motioned me to sit in a chair on the other side of the table.

And then followed one of those sometimes strange but often illuminating cross-cultural conversations.

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Is this just me, or does anyone else find a rooting interest in every sporting contest ever invented?

Seems a bit odd, now that I think about it, but that’s how it works. And not just with teams I know. Within five minutes of watching a match between teams I do not know … I will prefer that one win over the other.

I was thinking of this today when I announced, at about 10 p.m., that if Bournemouth could keep from being beaten by Chelsea … my day, vis a vis about seven games, would be nearly perfect.

But why should I have cared, at all, about the outcomes of that many games?

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Muscat is one of those names that seems to say “exotic city”. A place quite unlike Main Street USA.

The name does not quite reach the level of Timbuktu or Samarkand, in terms of connoting images of Old World trade, and caravans and spices, but it’s not just another town with a souq.

It did not disappoint.

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On the map, driving to Muscat looks straightforward. Get from Abu Dhabi to Al Ain, cross over into Oman, go through the Oman “border” post about 30 clicks inside the country … and make a right turn at Sohar. Eventually Muscat; can’t miss it.

“On the map”, however, gave us no indication of possible delays at passport or customs control, and huge delays at those two stations turned a five-hour trip into an 11-hour ordeal.

A classic case of not asking around, failure to perform due diligence, just being generically lame … led to lots and lots of wasted time and our first visit to Oman turning into a colossal pain.

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On November 13, it was Paris.

Today it was San Bernardino, California.

The past few years, I have spent more time in Paris — where 129 were killed in terror attacks on November 13 — than in California. And we had stayed, the week before, in Paris, on the very street where people were killed while eating dinner.

But I worked in downtown San Bernardino for most of my adult life, and that is the city where 14 people were killed today.

In both cases, the slaughters seem only one remove or so from my own egocentric existence, and I can easily envision the places where people were killed and sense the distress among those who live in those two cities. And it’s all weird.

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So, back on Friday, we hosted an American-style Thanksgiving dinner. Six people, but food for about 12 and leftovers on an epic scale.

(You never want to run out of food when hosting, and especially not when hosting Thanksgiving.)

And, being, usually, Old School proponents of not wasting perfectly good comestibles — this, in a country that throws away an astonishing amount of food — into the fridge it went.

Several pounds of turkey stripped off the bird’s carcass. More than a pint (but less than a quart) of giblet-based gravy. A couple of pounds of mashed potatoes. At least a pound of stuffing. A pound of cranberry sauce. A dozen dinner rolls. Half a plate of brownies. Half a pumpkin pie.

All of it duly wrapped in foil (it’s airtight, right?) and forced into crevices of the refrigerator … and there to pose questions and dilemmas as the time of the preparation of said food became increasingly an historical event.

When does consuming the remnants of a feast become just a plain ol’ bad idea?

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Kobe Bryant’s decision on Sunday to announce his retirement, effective at the end of the current season, was timely and proper and even a bit quixotic, coming as it did in the form of a poem written by the player and posted on a somewhat obscure players forum.

What he addressed in those words was his realization that he will be leaving the stage soon, and his tribute to fans was fitting, giving that their shouts and cheering and applause validated every success he enjoyed as a Los Angeles Laker.

It always is difficult to close the door behind a life’s work, and how hard must it be for the elite athlete, who not only walks away from the adulation and the spotlight of professional sports, but also usually steps directly into middle age, giving up his attempt to hold on to the youth that served him so well, right along with his hopes for continued success (even mastery?) in his chosen field.

It gets a bit harder for Kobe, too, in that his coming departure already is being heralded as the final hoops appearances of a man whose entire approach to basketball increasingly has been set aside as irrelevant, wrong-headed, even while he plays out the final months of his career.

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As a sports editor, it is easy to wonder why various fields of endeavor cannot arrange their schedules so that they don’t overlap and dilute their audience — as well as the media recognition they might get that night or the next morning.

Today, for instance, we had at least four events that could have been our lead story, nine days out of 10.

Which is rather annoying, knowing that by the middle of this week we will have far softer stories in the newspaper.

The traffic jam on this side of the world started with the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix.

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“Flugtag” came to Dubai this weekend.

It’s a Red Bull promotional notion, in which people/daredevils are invited to build a flying machine, push it off a 30-foot-high ramp and see how long they can remain airborne.

Generally, less than five seconds.

It’s a silly competition, but something you have to watch, like train wrecks — but a lot less dangerous.

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Our seventh Thanksgiving celebration since moving to the UAE, and our most Emirati version yet.

Yes, the actual holiday was yesterday, but I was pulling a desk shift in the office … and people in the UAE can’t be expected to know that the dinner should have gone on the day before.

When you’re out of the States, you figure out a way to make it work. The day and even the meal might need to be adjusted.

So, a meal for six in our apartment, and our four guests, each of them Emiratis, had never been to a Thanksgiving dinner. We were happy to give them our interpretation.

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